Okay, so the extra-videos-of -the-month-during-the-summer thing didn’t work out quite like I’d planned. I was away all of July and August on an extended family road trip and I really thought that I would have more access to the internet than I did.

Dylan is an import to Canada from Melbourne, Australia – currently living in Toronto. One of the benefits of being a bit slow with this particular video-of-the-month is that I can now tell you that Dylan won the 2012 Canadian Fingerstyle Guitar Competition last month! Congratulations, Dylan!

As is my custom, I will be doubling up on videos-of-the-month for the summer months, when it is a bit harder to sit in front of a screen writing about playing guitar when I could be outside playing guitar. The second video-of-the-month for July features a young duo from Texas…

Fragile Balance consists of two young guitarists who met in high school two years ago, Nick Cooper and Cruz Lujan. So far, they have released two full length CDs and have shared a stage with the likes of Antoine Dufour and Michael Chapdelaine.

Here they are playing “Elements of Emotion”:

Once again, I’m looking forward to seeing what the future holds for these talented young men…

Summer is here, so in keeping with past tradition I will start presenting two videos each month to try to offset my reluctance to sit at my computer writing new posts during the summer weather.

The first video-of-the-month for July features classical guitarist Maja Radovanlija. Following my post about the lack of female guitarists, Maja wrote me a note suggesting that, at least in the classical world, there are more female guitarists than many of us realize. She suggested that it may be that women just aren’t as aggressive at promoting themselves.

Here Maja plays “Lento from Jazz Sonata” by Dusan Bogdanovic:

Originally from Serbia, Maya is a faculty member at the University of Minnesota School of Music.

Early in May, I led a workshop on “Practicing Without Your Guitar” at the York Region Fingerstyle Guitar Association’s monthly Open Mic. I am now working on getting some of the insights from that workshop written down and posted. In this, the third of four installments, I am going to talk about working on Rhythm and Tempo without your guitar.

Rhythm

A while ago I wrote about attending a guitar workshop led by David Ross MacDonald at the Eaglewood Folk Festival. In that workshop he talked about how he used a sort of two step to embed various rhythms (i.e eighths, triplets, sixteenths, etc.) into his brain. You can also tap out rhythms in time with your metronome, or even use your left hand to tap out a steady beat while tapping out more complex rhythms with the right (or vice versa, if that’s how you’re wired).

Tempo

One of the biggest challenges for many musicians is starting at the right tempo. As it turns out, our brains have a remarkable capacity for reproducing the tempo of well known songs. For example, according to Daniel Levitin, in his book, “This Is Your Brain On Music”, we can use the following songs to find the following tempos:

I have pre-empted my regularly scheduled Video-of-the-Month to pay tribute to one of the great guitarists of all time, Arthel Lane “Doc” Watson, who passed away on May 29th at the age of 89.

Having lost his eyesight at an early age, Doc first learned to play the banjo on an instrument that his dad made. He switched to guitar while attending a school for the blind. He went on to become one of the great “flatpickers” of all time.

This video (actually, audio only) is from the Newport Folk Festival, 1963, where Doc caught his first “big break”. Here he plays two of his signature pieces: “Doc’s Guitar” (a.k.a. “Tickling the Strings”) a fingerpicking tune, and “Black Mountain Rag” a flatpicking tune.

Earlier this month, I led a workshop on “Practicing Without Your Guitar” at the York Region Fingerstyle Guitar Association’s monthly Open Mic. I am now working on getting some of the insights from that workshop written down and posted. Two weeks ago, I talked about why we might want to practice without our guitar. This week I am going to talk about visualization techniques.

We often hear athletes talk about using visualizing techniques to help them on their road to success. One thing that came up during the workshop was the legendary story of the golfer who kept himself sane as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam by imagining playing a round of golf at his home course each day. When he finally did get home, the story goes, he had only lost a couple of strokes off his game. While the veracity of this story may be in doubt, the benefits of visualization techniques are not.

One way that we can use visualization is to play “air guitar”. We can imagine playing new chord shapes or playing a familiar chord progression – maybe playing that chord progression on another part of the neck. We can imagine playing scales – working through the major, and various minor and modal scales, hearing them in our mind as we “play” them.

We can also pick up some sheet music (standard notation or tablature) and visualize playing it. If you are using standard notation, figure out the best place to play each note, and, where applicable, figure out which chord voicings will work most effectively.

A final area where we can use visualization is in performance. Years ago I heard Olympic Gold Medalist, Mark Tewksbury tell a story about sneaking into the, then unfinished, pool in Barcelona and imagining the crowds and walking across the deck to the starting blocks and hearing the starters pistol and how it helped him to perform on the actual day of competition. As musicians, we can do the same by imagining an audience, imagining taking our place on the stage and nailing those first few notes. We can also use this type of visualization with our instrument in hand too – when we are working on performance pieces, we should be imagining our audience and even practicing our verbal bits between songs.

“If you practice with your fingers,
no amount is enough.
If you practice with your head,
two hours is plenty.”

— Leopold Auer upon being asked by violinist Nathan
Milstein how long he should practice each day.

The rest of the article talks about the importance of being engaged while you practice and discusses the the pitfalls of the “typical” practice routine and the importance of breaking down your material into small bits and really analyzing your playing as you work on those small chunks.